It's not a wedding, it's a FESTIBRATION!

According to most of America, I am completely nuts. I am a bride-to-be and my whole world should be consumed by seating charts and invitations. I should be agonizing over which shade of lavender our napkins should be. My mind should be slowly disintegrating under the pressure of which dress I should spend a small fortune on. And if that’s not enough to turn me into a drooling, zombified stereotype, there’s also all that competitive and unrealistic expectation to be met.

Sorry America, I just can’t give a shit.

While I experience a wide variety of reactions to my thoughts on weddings and marriage, there are a few that stick with me. Mostly from the people I love. So of course, I wrote about it. After posting these thoughts on a wedding website, it received a HUGE amount of response. So I thought I'd share with you what I shared with them.

A letter to our loved ones.

I have always been a girly girl/tomboy hybrid. As a child, I insisted on wearing a dress everyday to go tree climbing or frog catching. In college I played Snow White at Disney World and lived in a house full of my crazy male friends and worked on cars. I see how this duality could be confusing to some. But for me, it is just my life.

I have always marched to my own beat (which most people couldn't hear). Y'all - my dear family- love to regale each other with stories of my strange childhood antics. But you always do it lovingly and I like knowing you paid so much attention to me as a kid although I didn't realize it. 

So when I announced our non-traditional wedding plans I expected you to say "I knew it. Your wedding is going to be SO cool." Instead, what came out of your mouth blew me away. "What happened to your princess wedding!?" (Cue brain-splatter) 

My WHAT?! When did I plan that?

After much discussion, it became clear that you had been planning my wedding in your head for quite some time. This is not something new to most people. But it is just not what I expected from my motorcycle riding, free spirited mother. Also, I have four sisters, so I just assumed you didn't have the time or energy to do that for all of us. (Color me incorrect.)

We made our plans with a naive thought "Let's have three weddings and that way we all get what we want!" FH wants a ceremony with just the two of us. I want a Native American ceremony with my family. You all said you want a party. And our friends just want to get drunk and have a good time. 

So we are doing all of these things. However, it is HOW we are doing them that apparently has many a panty in a bunch. The ceremony with our dear family is a Native American ceremony and does not utilize an officiant. It is spoken by each member of the immediate family and you pronounce us as  members of the family community together. This ceremony is very important to me and feels exactly like what a wedding should be (for us).

You seem to be coming to terms with these plans, but you REFUSE to call it a wedding. Simply because there is no officiant. We feel that it is so much more meaningful to have you (our family) perform this ceremony than to have someone we don't know tell us we are married. 

So you win Mom, it is not a wedding. It is not a mock up of everything you have been told a wedding is. It is not regurgitated words and jordan almonds. It's our month-long Marriage Festibration! It is a six country adventure to begin our biggest adventure of all. And most importantly, it is what we believe a wedding should be about: us, you, our past, future and the people that make us who we are. I can only hope that when the day comes, you will see the beauty and intimacy of this ceremony and recognize it for what it is. A union of our hearts and our families.